Side story 2 Ch 2.1

Middle. Part 2

When he saw Seo Yeowon sprawled out on his bed after being captured, the desire he had been suppressing crashed over him like a violent wave. The sweet scent in his rhythmic breaths stirred his unresolved l**t to a boiling point. He wanted to grab his hair, shove his c*ck between his pale thighs, and f*ck him senseless. He wanted to bite the back of his neck, where his scent was strongest, and hear his soft whimpers escape his lips.

He gulped over and over, but left his sleeping figure untouched. He remembered all the times he had held back this brutal desire. Since it had been a while, he would wait longer and devour him properly when he was in his right mind. Everything tasted best after being left to mature.

The man had stepped out of the room and was wetting his throat at the table. How much time had passed? Soon, a faint sound stirred from within the room. Seo Yeowon, who never really knew how to sleep properly, had woken up. Just as the man raised his glass to his lips, he faltered without a sound.

“…CEO.”

Seo Yeowon called out to him. His tone was flat, the ending almost fading into nothing—yet strangely, it tickled the man’s ear. That bizarre sensation made his fingertips tingle for a brief moment.

“There’s something I’d like to ask of you.”

At those words, a chill ran down the man’s throat. A vivid image pierced his mind—his hand wrapped around the nape of Yeowon’s neck, shaking him violently.

Had it not been for the next thing Yeowon said, the man might have made that thought a reality.

“…CEO, you said you were curious. About what happened to my fingers.”

The man’s eyes flashed with an icy blue gleam.

“If I tell you… will you help me?”

The man’s mind sank into interest. As though he had already seized victory and was cradling the trophy in his arms, he drew Yeowon close and listened generously. As Yeowon’s words continued to spill from his lips, the man watched his face gradually sink deeper into anguish.

***

 

Leaving the sleeping Yeowon behind, the man stepped out of the bedroom and stood on the terrace with a cigarette between his lips. As he flicked the wheel to light it, Kim Joongdeok’s voice flowed out from the receiver.

 

-We found Im Sun-hwa’s bankbook. But, sir… there’s something more important. Behind the trunk…

Suddenly, the man felt someone’s gaze and turned around. A tall, slender figure stood behind him. So pale that it seemed to glow like a lamp even in the dark. Eyes widened, lips frozen in fear. The terrified face prompted the man to shut the door and block out the sound, feeling strangely content with the eyes piercing into his back.

 

-…Sir?

“Keep talking.”

 

-We picked up a brick from behind the trunk. But there was blood on it. I think you need to come see it for yourself.

A brick. The man recalled the red brick Yeowon had once mentioned. After finishing his cigarette, he ordered the car to be brought around.

As he opened the terrace door and stepped out, Yeowon approached. His irises, paler than most people’s, met the man’s gaze.

“…Where are you going?”

The man didn’t answer the cautious question. He turned his back to those pleading eyes. He wanted to pin down the body wrapped in a white robe once again—but there was a place he needed to be.

He left the house at once and got into the car.

***

The car raced along the dawn roads, heading toward a wooded hill. At the base of the mountain, a shabby truck was parked. Kim Joongdeok, waiting beside it, bowed his head to the man.

“You’ve arrived.”

Kim Joongdeok handed him the bankbook he had been holding. For some reason, it was covered in dirt. The man flipped through the dirty pages with his thumb. Seeing the amount recorded, he cast a cold gaze. Just under ten million won.

“It was in the glove compartment. The brick I mentioned is in the trunk.”

Kim Joongdeok escorted his boss to the trunk so he could see for himself. A black plastic bag lay there. Inside the crumpled bag was a fairly ordinary brick. He said it was gone—yet he had been driving around with it in the trunk the entire time.

The bloodstains were vivid. It was obvious he hadn’t even tried to clean it. If the police had shown up, they would’ve instantly named Yeowon as the culprit. What irony. He had scrubbed Yeowon’s hands raw with sandpaper under the pretense of removing fingerprints—yet left the murder weapon intact.

That sandpapering only served to instill more guilt in Yeowon. The man began to question it. Did the guy really believe fingerprints would be erased with just that? Or had he even intended to erase evidence at all?

Only Im Seoncheol would know the answer.

“……”

The man slowly turned away. He realized he needed to clean this up properly. No doubt the guy had left a trail of evidence behind. The way he was still carrying it all in the trunk said everything.

***

He sought out Im Seoncheol again at the crematory. The man, dressed in slacks, bent his knees to meet his gaze and asked,

“Mr. Im.”

The meat in the crematory, foaming at the mouth and eyes rolled back, looked his way. Those dull eyes didn’t quite meet the man’s face—nor did they completely avoid it. Even in his half-lucid state, Im Seoncheol flinched at the man’s next words.

“Do you remember the day Seo Byung-jin’s head was smashed in?”

“I—I don’t know… I don’t know anything!”

Im Seoncheol kept muttering that he didn’t remember, and the man tilted his chin. Boredom filled his gaze as he stared at the nuisance of flesh before him.

“I swear I don’t know, I know nothing!”

Im Seoncheol shook his head wildly as if trying to rid himself of his facial features. The man furrowed his brow, and Kim Joongdeok kicked Im’s stomach hard. A blunt act of violence.

Already weak, Im Seoncheol didn’t last long. Coughing up blood, he finally gave them the date.

“What time was it?”

“…Guh! A-around 1 or 2 a.m…”

The man instructed him to retrieve the CCTV footage from that date.

Before half a day passed, Kim Joongdeok returned. He had obtained highway CCTV footage from a detective covering for them and handed it to the man.

The man returned to the penthouse at the Royal to check the footage. Sinking into the couch, he stared at the screen that filled his vision. It showed Im Seoncheol’s truck speeding down the dark highway after leaving Woljung Village.

Two hours later, the truck was spotted again on the CCTV of the Daenam IC highway.

“……”

After leaving the highway, the truck was last seen heading toward a nearby mountain. The man ordered his staff to search the area.

It took a full two days before they discovered Seo Byung-jin’s buried body.

The earth looked as though it had been previously disturbed. As they dug deeper, a faint stench of decay began to rise. The smell of death.

Eventually, as they went deeper still, the shovel struck something with a dull thud. Digging more broadly around it revealed something wrapped in cloth. Kim Joongdeok, wearing gloves, peeled the fabric away.

The body had already decomposed into a skeleton. The skull—where flesh should’ve once been—was heavily battered. Several deep gashes suggested strikes from a sharp weapon.

“……”

Staring at the gruesome wounds, the man felt something strange. Yeowon had said he only swung the brick once. Then why was Seo Byung-jin’s skull covered in so many marks? He had clearly been struck multiple times, and with significant force, by something sharp.

“Sir.”

One of the staff called out to the man, who was momentarily lost in thought.

“We found a phone. It appears to be Seo Byung-jin’s.”

“……”

The man, wearing black gloves, accepted the worn phone. Kim Joongdeok gestured to the corpse.

“What should we do?”

“Remember the location and bury it again.”

 

***

The man returned to Royal’s penthouse.

After showering, he came out in a robe and turned on Seo Byung-jin’s phone. Light glowed from the phone, which had been revived by a staff member who had retrieved a charger in advance, and the screen came back on.

As he examined the cracked screen like fractured glass, searching for evidence from that day, the man found something strange in the call history. There was a call to 112 that hadn’t gone through due to poor signal and had been cut off.

The time was 2:03 AM.

The muscles in the man’s neck tensed. At that time, Im Seoncheol’s truck would’ve already left Woljung Village and been on the Dongyeong Expressway. It meant Seo Byung-jin was already dead by then. How could this call log still exist?

The man theorized that maybe Im Seoncheol had called using Seo Byung-jin’s phone. But before long, he reached a tentative conclusion that it wasn’t likely. Im Seoncheol had been the one transporting the body himself. A packaged corpse, at that. He too could be accused of participating in the murder so would he have done something so reckless?

Besides, Im Seoncheol had gained leverage over Seo Yeowon through this incident. He wouldn’t throw away fortune that had rolled right to his feet.

Then who had made that call?

The man’s eyes gleamed sharply.

Suddenly, the traces left on Seo Byung-jin’s head flashed through his mind. Seo Yeowon had said she struck him with a brick. But those wounds didn’t quite match the kind inflicted by a blunt object like a brick. They seemed more consistent with something sharper.

“……”

The man had started retracing the events of that day to clean up the aftermath—but he’d stumbled upon something unexpected. A sense of unease crawled across his gut.

He replayed the expressway CCTV footage he had previously paused. Though the footage was dark, there weren’t many cars since it was still early morning. About 30 minutes in, Im Seoncheol’s truck appeared again.

Unlike the other vehicles speeding by due to the open road, Im Seoncheol’s truck gradually slowed down. Then it came to a full stop on the shoulder of the highway.

…What’s he doing? The man narrowed his eyes.

It was too dark to make out anything clearly on the screen. Im Seoncheol’s truck stayed hidden in the shadows for quite a while. Only after about thirty minutes did it start moving again. A black shadow frantically clambered into the driver’s seat and quickly drove off.

The man replayed the footage. Then again. He kept watching a certain segment repeatedly until finally pausing at one frame.

Splash. The black shadow had both arms raised, and something fell from the tips of his fingers.

***

This time, the man drove himself.

He headed to the stretch of the expressway where Im Seoncheol had briefly stopped and noticed something strange.

It had taken Im Seoncheol two hours to drive from Dongyeong Expressway to Daenam IC. But when the man drove the same route, it only took a little over thirty minutes. There was an unexplained gap in time.

“……”

Pulling over at the same shoulder seen in the footage, the man stepped out from the driver’s seat. Retracing the route from the video, he found a sunken area on the roadside—

A drainage ditch.

He stepped into it with his shoe and reached toward the thicket. Then he pulled something out.

…A shovel, with a wooden handle and a metal head shaped like an upside-down triangle.

Dark reddish stains, old and faded, were smeared across the end of the blade.

Yes. Those dense wounds in Seo Byung-jin’s skull hadn’t quite fit the profile of brick injuries. The tool had to have been sharper, something with a defined edge. …Like this shovel.

Seo Yeowon, overcome by a sudden surge of emotion, had struck his father’s head. But that was all. He hadn’t gone any further. He wasn’t the type of person capable of killing.

The man tapped his temple lightly with his fingers and began piecing together the information in his mind.

A ninety-minute gap between two CCTV cameras.
A shovel stained with too much blood for a simple burial.
A phone call record, despite the body supposedly being dead by that time.

…What if Seo Byung-jin hadn’t been dead yet?